David Wheatley | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/profile/david-wheatley
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French Poetry from Medieval to Modern Times review – warm humanity, brave choiceshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/11/french-poetry-from-medieval-to-modern-times-review-warm-humanity-brave-choices
Editor Patrick McGuinness has assembled a rich and wide-ranging anthology that shows the strong links between French and English<p>‘I<em>l faut être absolument moderne</em>,” wrote Rimbaud: we must be absolutely modern. Has there been a foreign-language tradition more influential to modern English poetry than French? From <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/wbyeats">WB Yeats</a>’s symbolist beginnings to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/ezra-pound">Ezra Pound</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/ts-eliot">TS Eliot</a>’s discovery of Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière, from <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/gertrude-stein">Gertrude Stein</a>’s cubist prose poems to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/09/selected-poems-frank-ohara-review">Frank O’Hara</a> carrying a Pierre Reverdy book in his pocket, 20th-century Anglophone poetry offers strong evidence for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/wallace-stevens">Wallace Stevens</a>’s claim that “French and English constitute a single language”.</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/patrick-mcguinness">Patrick McGuinness</a>, who is among the most Gallic (or, strictly speaking, Belgian) of modern British poets, has assembled a careful yet copious anthology, demonstrating just how close the two traditions are. Handily pocket-sized, this is not the book for great tracts of the <em>Roman de la Rose</em> and other early epics in translation; its medieval selections incline to <em>ballades</em> and <em>chansons</em> and the ultra-concision of this Christine de Pisan <em>rondeau</em>, in Norman Shapiro’s translation:</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/11/french-poetry-from-medieval-to-modern-times-review-warm-humanity-brave-choices">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFranceFri, 11 Aug 2017 11:30:14 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/11/french-poetry-from-medieval-to-modern-times-review-warm-humanity-brave-choicesPhotograph: Barney JonesPhotograph: Barney JonesDavid Wheatley2017-08-11T11:30:14ZUnreconciled by Michel Houellebecq review – perfectly suited to the age of Trumphttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/12/unreconciled-poems-michel-houellebecq-review
<p>Laughter is in short supply in this collection from France’s great satirist and contrarian</p><p>Having missed out on the 1930s, Michel Houellebecq is perfectly suited to the age of Trump. The war of ideologies, religious fundamentalism and sexual dystopia are well-worn Houellebecq themes, but under them like an ostinato runs the death of western liberalism: the full <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West">Spenglerian decline</a>. As he explains in “A Last Stand Against the Free Market”, “We reject liberal ideology for failing to show the way, or a route to reconciliation between the individual and his fellow beings.” As snappy aperçus go (and bear in mind, that’s a line of poetry), it’s not quite “We must love one another or die”. Long-windedness, however, is the least of Houellebecq’s problems.</p><p>The poems collected in <em>Unreconciled</em> tack between rhythmical grumbles about the state of the world and more straightforwardly sensory epiphanies, Baudelairean ennui permitting. Most are untitled, and few cross the page. As a rule, modernity is an enemy. Houellebecq is one of those who suspect the invention of the fridge has been bad for the soul: “A well-cleaned kitchen; / Ah! This obsession with kitchens!” The ascendancy of the domestic has repercussions for masculine high-mindedness too: “Hollow, decayed discourse; / The opinions of the woman next door.”</p><p>A few chavs threw menacing looks<br>At the loaded babes and the dirty mags;<br>Some executives were consuming; their only function.<br>And you weren’t there. I love you, Véronique.</p><p>Window-shopping in a red-light district, Houellebecq is an amateur sociologist turned sweaty-palmed punter</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/12/unreconciled-poems-michel-houellebecq-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryMichel HouellebecqBooksCultureThu, 12 Jan 2017 14:00:29 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/12/unreconciled-poems-michel-houellebecq-reviewPhotograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty ImagesPhotograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty ImagesDavid Wheatley2017-01-12T14:00:29ZSlakki: New & Neglected Poems by Roy Fisher review – a collection with extraordinary visionhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/14/slakki-new-and-neglected-poems-by-roy-fisher-review
<p>From Birmingham’s city blocks to memories of war to restless skies – the quality is consistently high in this collection of work from the past 65 years</p><p>In 1951, citizens still chafing at postwar rationing were treated to the Festival of Britain; Newcastle won the FA Cup; Anthony Powell published the first volume of <em>A Dance to the Music of Time</em>; and in Birmingham the young Roy Fisher was appearing in the student journal Mermaid. Given that he has had 65 years to reprint these juvenilia, they must be some of the “neglected” poems announced in the subtitle of his new book.</p><p>In one of his 1951 poems, “A Vision of Four Musicians”, we are treated to “tenuous music” played by travelling musicians and “fragile as an echo from the journey they came”. Tenuous Fisher’s music may be, but over his long career he has been uniquely adept at catching echoes lost on other, noisier poets. His first pamphlet, <em>City</em> (1961) takes British poetry to places it had never been before, thematically and stylistically, capturing Fisher’s native Birmingham at a moment of postwar transformation and showing the effects of early exposure to the work of William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. The 1960 poem “Night Walkers” was originally intended as part of <em>City</em> but is collected here for the first time. Pitched somewhere between TS Eliot’s “Preludes” and Terence Davies’s film <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/13/terence-davies-time-and-the-city"><em>Of Time and the City</em></a> (“Darkness hisses at the town-blocks’ end”, and “There’s a smashed box of wind in every street”), it displays the combination of intimacy and distance, fever and calm, that is such a feature of Fisher’s writing.</p><p>Still suspecting there may be nothing more to itself<br>than optical tricks and water vapour<br>it works even harder to be remembered,<br>colouring its sunsets with particles<br>from all the barbecues and crematoria of the North.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/14/slakki-new-and-neglected-poems-by-roy-fisher-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFri, 14 Oct 2016 16:30:41 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/14/slakki-new-and-neglected-poems-by-roy-fisher-reviewPhotograph: Alamy Stock PhotoPhotograph: Alamy Stock PhotoDavid Wheatley2016-10-14T16:30:41ZPoetic Artifice: A Theory of 20th-Century Poetry by Veronica Forrest-Thomson – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/02/petic-artifice-theory-poetry-veronica-forrest-thomson-review
This classic study, reprinted after more than 30 years, prefers bad new things to good old ones<p>The death of Veronica Forrest-Thomson in 1975, aged just 27, is among the most galling and tragic losses to modern British poetry. Born in Malaya and raised in Glasgow, she published a first poetry collection at 20 and gravitated to Cambridge, where she was taught <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/08/poems-jh-prynne-review" title="">by JH Prynne</a>. Heavily influenced by the close reading tradition of IA Richards and William Empson, her criticism also drew on French structuralist and poststructuralist theory, then much in the air.</p><p>Published posthumously in 1978 and now reprinted for the first time, her classic study <em>Poetic Artifice</em> marked a provocative intervention. There is a widespread and mistaken assumption, Forrest-Thomson argues, that poetry is&nbsp;important for what it tells us about the external world. Not so: poetry is important for its vindication of “all the&nbsp;rhythmic, phonetic, verbal and logical devices” that make it what it is,&nbsp;and the production of “alternative imaginary orders”. Anything else is flim-flam. It is not the job of poetry to&nbsp;deliver states of “inarticulate rapture”, but to be the articulation of&nbsp;that rapture.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/03/david-gascoyne-poetry-kate-middleton">A fitting eulogy for the lost surrealist</a> </p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/02/petic-artifice-theory-poetry-veronica-forrest-thomson-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryLiterary criticismBooksCultureMarcel DuchampFri, 02 Sep 2016 16:01:06 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/02/petic-artifice-theory-poetry-veronica-forrest-thomson-reviewPhotograph: Miles ThomsonPhotograph: Miles ThomsonDavid Wheatley2016-09-02T16:01:06ZNew Selected Poems by Derek Mahon review – lyrics of crystalline wonderhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/17/new-selected-poems-derek-mahon-review
<p>A diptych of early and late work displays a consistency of skill and wit across 40 years</p><p><sup>‘</sup>Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground,” wrote the young Derek Mahon in “In Carrowdore Churchyard”, his elegy for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jan/20/featuresreviews.guardianreview24">Louis MacNeice</a>, “all we may ask of you we have.” Ashes may not stir, but poems can and do: Mahon’s elegy is now titled “Carrowdore” and the elegant summation of the dead poet’s work has become “Soon the biographies / and buried poems will begin to appear.” Mahon’s first selected poems was in 1979, since when he has published two further selected poems and two collected poems, revising and deleting work as he goes. A biography has appeared too, <a href="https://bookshop.theguardian.com/after-the-titanic.html/?utm_source=editoriallink&amp;utm_medium=merch&amp;utm_campaign=article">Stephen Enniss’s <em>After the Titanic</em></a>, with its share of “buried poems”. “A great disorder is an order,” writes <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/wallace-stevens">Wallace Stevens</a> in “Connoisseur of Chaos”. For the sake of the reader trying to steer a course through Mahon’s work, one can only hope so.</p><p>More than 40 years since their first publication, Mahon lyrics such as those of <a href="http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2002/56-mahon.html">“Glengormley”</a>, “An Image from Beckett” and “Lives” retain their crystalline wonder. Marvellian cadence and existential menace are thrillingly conjoined. Where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/seamusheaney">Seamus Heaney</a> used his bog bodies to enter the mind of the tribe, “Lives” issues stark warnings to us to revise our “insolent ontology”. <a href="http://www.english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&amp;poems/delft.html">“Courtyards in Delft”</a> is Vermeeresque in its capturing of the poet’s childhood, and of the eerie calm of art in the midst of social turmoil. <a href="http://www.troublesarchive.com/artforms/poetry/piece/a-disused-shed-in-co-wexford">“A Disused Shed in Co Wexford”</a>, that hymn of distress in the face of historical atrocity, is truly Yeatsian in scope and ambition.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/17/new-selected-poems-derek-mahon-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureLouis MacNeiceFri, 17 Jun 2016 13:00:02 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/17/new-selected-poems-derek-mahon-reviewPhotograph: Eamonn McCabe for the GuardianPhotograph: Eamonn McCabe for the GuardianDavid Wheatley2016-06-17T13:00:02ZSam Gardiner obituaryhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/14/sam-gardiner-obituary
Hard-hitting but witty Northern Irish poet<p>Sam Gardiner, who has died aged 79, was a distinguished member of the generation of Northern Irish poets that also included <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/30/seamus-heaney" title="">Seamus Heaney</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/michael-longley" title="">Michael Longley</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview11" title="">Derek Mahon</a>.</p><p>While Mahon traded Protestant Ulster for visions of exotic elsewheres, Gardiner was adept at uncovering his sceptical humanist visions closer to home. In his poem <a href="http://poetrysociety.org.uk/poems/protestant-windows/" title="">Protestant Windows</a>, winner of the 1993 National Poetry Competition, he transplants the violence of the Reformation to a quiet suburban close. Arguing with some PVC window salesmen, a defender of the sash-cord window (introduced by King Billy, he claims) is martyred when the window descends unexpectedly on his head, leaving him “reel[ing] /towards eternity”.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/14/sam-gardiner-obituary">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureNorthern IrelandTue, 14 Jun 2016 10:48:28 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/14/sam-gardiner-obituaryPhotograph: Family PhotoPhotograph: Family PhotoDavid Wheatley2016-06-14T10:48:28ZThe Poems of TS Eliot: The Annotated Text review – a monumental achievementhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/13/the-poems-of-ts-eliot-annotated-text-christopher-ricks-jim-mccue-review
Eliot went from starchy student to Nobel laureate who could pack out baseball stadiums on an American tour. This landmark study provides the background to a groundbreaking body of work<p>Buying an edition of Dante’s <a href="https://bookshop.theguardian.com/divine-comedy-17.html" title=""><em>Divine Comedy</em></a> in Florence as a student, I was struck by its resemblance to the flood&nbsp;lines marked on the side of buildings to commemorate the great flood of 1966: sometimes the footnotes would creep almost all the way to the top of the page, leaving only one or two lines of actual text. Had Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue adopted footnotes rather than endnotes in their remarkable edition of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/ts-eliot" title="">TS Eliot</a>’s poems, whole pages of apparatus would surge by with barely a line of verse in sight. Volume one contains 346 pages of poems to 965 of commentary. In the second volume, notes follow text on a&nbsp;poem-by-poem basis, but their combined 290 pages is still outweighed by a 367-page “textual history”. It is a monumental achievement, and one that frames important and timely questions about the state of Eliot’s reputation.</p><p>“We beg to call to your attention /Some minor problems of the soul”, protests the breeze in the early poem “Goldfish (Essence of Summer Magazines)”. Eliot’s hegira from starchy student to the Nobel laureate who packed out baseball stadiums on an American tour remains one of the most compelling and strange of modern poetic careers. The young Eliot wrote some fine poems in French, and he had his reasons, too: the poet of <a href="https://bookshop.theguardian.com/prufrock-and-other-observations.html" title=""><em>Prufrock and Other Observations</em></a> is much more a belated contemporary of Laforgue, Corbière and Rimbaud than of the Georgians<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/ezra-pound" title=""> Ezra Pound</a> was busy skewering in <em>Hugh Selwyn Mauberley</em>. No less than with <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/wbyeats" title="">Yeats</a>, however, the legacy of the 1890s played its part. Eliot was extravagant in his praise for John Davidson’s “Thirty Bob a Week”, a plausible wellspring for the melancholy chambermaids and commuters that stalk his early work. Among the most important of his juvenilia is “The Death of Saint Narcissus”, a poem of guilt, humiliation and martyrdom. An obsession with drowning runs through Eliot’s writing, inspiring section four of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/apr/17/ts-eliot-waste-land-radical-text-wounded-culture" title=""><em>The Waste Land</em></a> (“Death by Water”). In later life he would deride his early poems, but their reservoirs of buried feelings served him well, keeping his desert places from drying out entirely. They also contain their share of genuine near-masterpieces, such as “Oh little voices in the throats of men”, almost as good in its way as “Portrait of a Lady” or “<em>La&nbsp;Figlia Che Piange</em>”.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/13/the-poems-of-ts-eliot-annotated-text-christopher-ricks-jim-mccue-review">Continue reading...</a>TS EliotPoetryBooksCultureFri, 13 Nov 2015 07:30:02 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/13/the-poems-of-ts-eliot-annotated-text-christopher-ricks-jim-mccue-reviewPhotograph: Bob Landry/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageTS Eliot in 1944. Photograph: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Photograph: Bob Landry/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagePhotograph: Bob Landry/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageTS Eliot in 1944. Photograph: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Photograph: Bob Landry/Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageDavid Wheatley2015-11-13T07:30:02ZPoems by JH Prynne review – ‘the ultimate poet of “anti-pathos”’https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/08/poems-jh-prynne-review
<p>Distance and difficulty, yes. But there’s also pleasure in the Stockhausen of modern poetry</p><p>In <em>The Making of the Reader</em>, David Trotter proposes a useful distinction between “pathos” and what he terms “anti-pathos”. In any poem the voice of the self and the voice of the text are subtly different. For a Romantic poet their clash results in pathos: the pathos of origins, sincerity and feeling. In modernist poetry, what we frequently get instead is “anti-pathos”, which rejects appeals to origins and insists on dissonance, not harmony, as the defining condition of art.</p><p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/10/featuresreviews.guardianreview30">JH Prynne</a> is the ultimate poet of anti-pathos. Everything about him spells distance and difficulty. He does not give poetry readings; he does not appear in anthologies and is never nominated for prizes; his books have Captain Beefheart-like titles such as <em>Her Weasels Wild Returning</em> and <em>Streak~~~Willing~~~Entourage~~~Artesian</em>; he attracts acolytes and execrators, rather than run-of-the-mill readers, and, most important, no one knows what any of it means. Such are the familiar assumptions where this poet is concerned. Passions run deep: when <em>The Oxford English Literary History</em> had the temerity to suggest that Prynne was more deserving of notice than Larkin, the brouhaha ended up on the <em>Today</em> programme. Now consider the following lines, from “The Glacial Question, Unsolved”:</p><p>We know where the north<br>is, the ice is an evening whiteness.<br>We know this, we are what it leaves:<br>the Pleistocene is our current scene, and<br>what in sentiment we are, we<br>are, the coast, a line or sequence, the<br>cut back down, to the shore.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/08/poems-jh-prynne-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFri, 08 May 2015 10:00:07 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/08/poems-jh-prynne-reviewPhotograph: /PRGeological visions … a favourite of Prynne’s.Photograph: /PRGeological visions … a favourite of Prynne’s.David Wheatley2015-05-08T10:00:07ZA Woman Without a Country by Eavan Boland review – into the shadowlands historyhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/21/a-woman-without-a-country-by-eavan-boland-review-shadowlands-myth-history
Has a poetry of myth, legacy and lost lands become a one-size-fits-all historical elegy <br /><p>Eavan Boland’s “The Wife’s Lament”, a&nbsp;translation from the Anglo-Saxon, begins: “I&nbsp;sing this poem full of grief. / Full of sorrow about my life / Ready to&nbsp;say the cruel state / I&nbsp;have endured, early of late.” It is a splendid performance, full of chancy verbal energy and rich historical witnessing. It’s also quite uncharacteristic of <a href="http://bookshop.theguardian.com/woman-without-a-country.html" title=""><em>A Woman Without a Country</em></a>, not in its subject matter, but in its ready embrace of rhyme and regular metre. Where themes of history and loss are concerned, Boland more usually inclines to the jagged and the elliptical, and this collection is no exception.</p><p>The book is about loss and, to paraphrase Robert Hass, in this it resembles all other Boland books. In the typical Boland poem, it is always late in the day, literally and historically; the heroes and villains of history have fled the scene; and their victims have been arranged into decorative postures of melancholy rebuke. The details of history are sketched in a kind of knowing shorthand: “1890. Empire, attitude. / A&nbsp;rainy&nbsp;afternoon in Dublin” (“Edge of Empire”). Neglected lives are juxtaposed with the overweening narratives of empire and nation state: “My grandmother lived outside history. And she died there” (“Sea Change”). “Did she find her nation?” Boland asks of her grandmother, adding: “And does it matter?” The frequent questioning in&nbsp;Boland’s work over the last four or more decades, and the continuing shortage of&nbsp;answers, suggest a challenge that is&nbsp;it not just difficult but&nbsp;well-nigh impossible.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/21/a-woman-without-a-country-by-eavan-boland-review-shadowlands-myth-history">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureSat, 21 Feb 2015 16:30:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/21/a-woman-without-a-country-by-eavan-boland-review-shadowlands-myth-historyPhotograph: George Karbus Photography/ George Karbus Photography/cultura/CorbisTurning tides … the Cliffs of Moher, County Clare Photograph: George Karbus Photography/ George Karbus Photography/cultura/CorbisPhotograph: George Karbus Photography/ George Karbus Photography/cultura/CorbisTurning tides … the Cliffs of Moher, County Clare Photograph: George Karbus Photography/ George Karbus Photography/cultura/CorbisDavid Wheatley2015-02-21T16:30:00ZSeamus Heaney, New Selected Poems 1966–1987 and New Selected Poems, 1988–2013 – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/12/seamus-heaney-new-selected-poems-1966-1987-1988-2013-review
Following his death last year, two selections of work from Heaney’s entire career offer an opportunity for reassessment and celebration<p>The atmosphere of grief and reverence that followed the death of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/seamusheaney" title="">Seamus Heaney</a> was punctured recently when an Irish newspaper carried a spirited attack on his reputation by Kevin Kiely. For Kiely, Heaney was a&nbsp;peddler of nostalgia who owed his success to sponsorship by Faber and Faber, impressionable Americans and timid academics. As criticism, Kiely’s tirade was nugatory, but it did serve one useful purpose, offering a reminder that the words of the dead are modified in the guts of the living, as Auden said, that strange things can happen to the reputations of recently dead writers. The 20th century is full&nbsp;of&nbsp;poets whose&nbsp;reputations have collapsed posthumously like circus tents in a strong breeze: Vachel Lindsay, Archibald MacLeish, Edith Sitwell, Cecil Day-Lewis. Poets go out of fashion and come back (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/23/books.artsandhumanities" title="">HD</a>), suffer a temporary down-grading when the biography comes out (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/philiplarkin" title="">Philip Larkin</a>), or get relaunched in new and unexpected forms (the “Radical Larkin” of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/johnosborne" title="">John Osborne</a>’s anti-revisionist critique).</p><p>The publication of Heaney’s <em>New&nbsp;Selected Poems 1988–2013</em>, and reprinting of <em>New Selected 1966–1987</em>, therefore marks an opportune moment for reassessment as well as celebration. A&nbsp;central aspect of Heaney’s work and its reception has been the encounter of the public and the private, most acutely in his treatment of the Northern Irish troubles. Heaney has been accused of an overcautious approach, aesthetically and politically, and of gravitating instinctively towards Parnassian inoffensiveness. Heaney, it is true, is no <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/bertolt-brecht" title="">Bertolt Brecht</a> or Hugh MacDiarmid, but to re-read <em>Door into the Dark</em> and <em>Wintering Out</em> is to be reminded of the febrile tension and unresolved conflict at work in apparently simple or innocuous poems. “In the shared calling of blood // arrives my need for antediluvian lore,” Heaney writes in “Gifts of Rain”, but where some see folksy piety, Heaney can just as easily be seen through the prism of modernist myth-making (he wrote enthusiastically in 1974 of the poetic psychogeography of&nbsp;David Jones’s “The Sleeping Lord”). The image of early Heaney as a pastoral ingenu is woefully in need of updating.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/12/seamus-heaney-new-selected-poems-1966-1987-1988-2013-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureSeamus HeaneyFri, 12 Dec 2014 17:19:09 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/12/seamus-heaney-new-selected-poems-1966-1987-1988-2013-reviewPhotograph: Geray Sweeney/Jeff Robinson PR/PASeamus Heaney. Photograph: Photograph: Geray Sweeney/Jeff Robinson PR/PAPhotograph: Geray Sweeney/Jeff Robinson PR/PASeamus Heaney. Photograph: Photograph: Geray Sweeney/Jeff Robinson PR/PADavid Wheatley2014-12-12T17:19:09ZMoontide by Niall Campbell review – a poetic symphony in the Outer Hebrideshttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/moontide-niall-campbell-review-poetry-symphony-outer-hebrides
Campbell's first collection of poems is full of striking moments illuminated by powerful lyric impulses<p>Stare long enough at a landscape and it stares back at you. I hadn't expected to find the truth of Nietzsche's observation borne out by the Westford Inn on North Uist, but perusing <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/05/letters-louis-macneice-jonathan-allison" title="">Louis MacNeice</a>'s <em>I&nbsp;Crossed the Minch</em> in that remote spot, I noticed the landlady produce a copy of her own. "An ideal site for a murder story," she declared, repeating MacNeice's verdict on her establishment. Niall Campbell's <em>Moontide</em> too spends a lot of time looking at the watery landscapes of Uist, only to notice that his moonstruck stance is already part of someone else's picture.</p><p>"On Eriskay" stages an encounter between the poet and a kelpie "at the fence", otherwise the dividing line between human and non-human realms, but also – in a poem that updates Arnold's "The Forsaken Merman" – the fence posts between originality and tradition. The kelpie drinks the moon "from a moon-filled trough", monopolising the natural world and placing the poet in the role of trespasser. The singer of "And This Was How It Started" is challenged to sing a thousand songs but, on running out&nbsp;of material, starts to imitate birdsong, moonlight and the stars, melting into the folk tradition.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/moontide-niall-campbell-review-poetry-symphony-outer-hebrides">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFri, 04 Jul 2014 15:30:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/moontide-niall-campbell-review-poetry-symphony-outer-hebridesPhotograph: Murdo MacleodSymphony in sea … Night falls in Uist in the Outer Hebrides. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the GuardianPhotograph: Murdo MacleodSymphony in sea … Night falls in Uist in the Outer Hebrides. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the GuardianDavid Wheatley2014-07-04T15:30:00ZStandard Twin Fantasy by Sam Riviere review – an elliptical amuse-bouchehttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/standard-twin-fantasy-sam-riviere-review-amuse-bouche
David&nbsp;Wheatley on&nbsp;the pleasures of caustic&nbsp;glamour and stylised paranoia<p>A whole secret history of contemporary poetry could be written from its chapbooks and pamphlets, those lo-fi leftovers from a simpler age of stapled-together print runs, embarrassing covers, and poems seen once in public and never again. Have you read Medbh McGuckian's <em>Single Ladies</em>, Derek Mahon's <em>Ecclesiastes</em>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/31/paul-muldoon-life-in-poetry" title="">Paul Muldoon</a>'s <em>The Wishbone</em>? If not, you're missing out. It is revealing that the most significant "lost" item in the Heaney corpus combines the pamphlet and that other poetry oddity, the prose poem: <em>Stations</em>, published in 1975, and now commanding dizzying prices on rare book sites.</p><p>Recent years have seen a revival of the pamphlet, as published by enterprising presses such as Tall Lighthouse, Oystercatcher, Landfill, Rack and <a href="http://www.eggboxpublishing.com/" title="">Egg Box</a>, and as celebrated by the Poetry Society's Michael Marks award. With <em>Standard Twin Fantasy</em>, Sam Riviere follows up his state-of-the-nation collection <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/03/81-austerities-sam-riviere-review" title=""><em>81 Austerities</em></a> with an elliptical amuse-bouche served up with no blurb, biographical note or anything else by way of authorial explanation. The text, too, is much like being at a party where you know no one and no one bothers with introductions. A woman called Kimberly is weighing a marble egg while harpsichord music plays, Veronique fiddles with a remote control, and "Bathsheba complicates the shadows of a fern".</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/standard-twin-fantasy-sam-riviere-review-amuse-bouche">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFri, 02 May 2014 15:30:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/standard-twin-fantasy-sam-riviere-review-amuse-bouchePhotograph: PRNon-sequitur surprises … Sam RivierePhotograph: PRNon-sequitur surprises … Sam RiviereDavid Wheatley2014-05-02T15:30:00ZImpromptus: Selected Poems by Gottfried Benn – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/31/impromptu-selected-poems-gottfried-benn-review
Michael&nbsp;Hofmann's compelling new translations, focussing mainly on the late works, reveal Benn's journey from early high-brow pessimism to a late 'sadness of the unfulfilled'<p>"And here he cited Benn, Ernst Jünger," declares the narrator of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/20/broken-hierarchies-poems-geoffrey-hill-review" title="">Geoffrey Hill</a>'s <em>The Triumph of Love</em> in a discussion of "creative nihilism, <em>Götterdämmerung</em>'s toy theatre." It is not the first time Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) has been on Hill's mind in recent times. Having praised Simone Weil on poetry and politics in "A Postscript on Modernist Poetics", Hill attacks TS Eliot's "inane" treatment of Benn in "The Three Voices of Poetry", an essay whose glossing over the German's Nazi sympathies strikes Hill as an exercise in emollient humbug.</p><p>Introducing his compelling new translations, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/15/michael-hofmann-learn-another-language" title="">Michael Hofmann</a> too picks up on Eliot's 1953 essay, along with references to Benn in John Berryman and Frank O'Hara, but insists that "Benn can scarcely be said to exist in the English-speaking world." There was a study-cum-translation, EB Ashton's <em>Primal Vision</em> in 1958, and that's more or less it. Readers trying to place Benn in the modern German canon (to which Hofmann's <em>Faber Book of 20th-century German Poems</em> is an invaluable guide) might want to think of him as occupying a midpoint between Stefan George's aristocratic symbolism and Bertolt Brecht's adventures in highbrow lowlife.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/31/impromptu-selected-poems-gottfried-benn-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFri, 31 Jan 2014 17:59:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/31/impromptu-selected-poems-gottfried-benn-reviewPhotograph: PRFrom highbrow to Hofbräu … Gottfried BennPhotograph: PRFrom highbrow to Hofbräu … Gottfried BennDavid Wheatley2014-01-31T17:59:00ZThe Hotel Oneira by August Kleinzahler – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/10/hotel-oneira-august-kleinzahler-review
Kleinzahler's work, dreamlike yet savvy, is among the most delightful flowerings of American poetry in our times<p>Few poets work the barometer harder than August Kleinzahler. In 1985 he published <em>Storm Over Hackensack</em> and in 1989 <em>Earthquake Weather</em>, and then in 1992 <em>Like Cities, Like Storms</em>. In his new collection, <em>The Hotel Oneira</em>, there is "a terrible storm" over the Pacific, "yet another storm cell from the west" and "Wrath of God thunder" in Texas. If not storms, it's fog: a "vast, bruise-coloured fogbank / sitting out there", "sea smoke, ghost vapor" as commuters wander off "this way and that, into the fog", or a poem titled "When the Fog".</p><p>The changeable weather is well matched to the transient surroundings. Nestling somewhere near the Hudson, the Hotel Oneira hosts a bridal party celebrating against the backdrop of a&nbsp;forlorn industrial landscape while freight trains rumble past carrying something that is "also inside my head". A Kleinzahler poem will often grapple with an internalised resistance to narration: "There is a story there, but one I choose not to know," ends the title poem, while in "Closing It Down on the Palisades" the aversion to&nbsp;knowledge takes the more dramatic form of a garbage truck compactor "grinding all 24 volumes of&nbsp;the Encyclopaedia Britannica".</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/10/hotel-oneira-august-kleinzahler-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFri, 10 Jan 2014 18:15:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/10/hotel-oneira-august-kleinzahler-reviewPhotograph: Doug Allen/Doug AllanBreaking the waves … August Kleinzahler evokes the forces of nature. Photograph: Doug AllenPhotograph: Doug Allen/Doug AllanBreaking the waves … August Kleinzahler evokes the forces of nature. Photograph: Doug AllenDavid Wheatley2014-01-10T18:15:00ZTrain Songs edited by Sean O'Brien and Don Paterson – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/01/train-songs-obrien-paterson-review
A collection of poems and lyrics, from Tom Waits to Philip Larkin to WH Auden, makes for an enchanting tribute to the railways<p>Among the tributes to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/30/seamus-heaney" title="">Seamus Heaney</a> that have circulated since his death in August was a <a href="https://twitter.com/matt_sperling/status/374486899626217475/photo/1" title="">photo on Twitter</a> of the entire text of his poem "The Railway Children" copied on to a London Underground whiteboard. As serendipity would have it, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/seanobrien" title="">Sean O'Brien</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/don-paterson" title="">Don Paterson</a> have placed "The Railway Children" first in <em>Train Songs</em>. For some, in our post-Beeching, post-Thatcher world, a landscape of railway tracks and telegraph poles retains its power to enchant, conjuring&nbsp;visions where we are "So&nbsp;infinitesimally scaled&nbsp;// We could stream through the&nbsp;eye of a needle."</p><p>British poetry has always been a network of overstretched intercity routes and quaintly mouldering branch&nbsp;lines. Wordsworth scowls at Lake District tourists in a late sonnet, Tony Harrison changes at York and Philip Larkin hopes the American academics contemplating the departures board in&nbsp;King's Cross "go&nbsp;to&nbsp;Newcastle and&nbsp;bother Basil Bunting instead". Speaking of Larkin, consider the following lines:</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/01/train-songs-obrien-paterson-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureSean O'BrienDon PatersonPhilip LarkinWH AudenThomas HardyTom WaitsMusicFri, 01 Nov 2013 18:12:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/01/train-songs-obrien-paterson-reviewPhotograph: Clifford HarperIllustration by Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.ukPhotograph: Clifford HarperIllustration by Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.ukDavid Wheatley2013-11-01T18:12:00ZPoetry and Privacy by John Redmond – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/21/poetry-privacy-john-redmond-review
The application of political rhetoric to poems can appear to make sense of them. But are critics just being lazy?<p>The public life of poetry today means different things to different people. To&nbsp;some it is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/carol-ann-duffy" title="">Carol Ann Duffy </a>writing a&nbsp;laureate poem on the banking crisis or&nbsp;Geoffrey Hill attacking her for mistaking "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/31/carol-ann-duffy-oxford-professory-poetry" title="">cast off bits of oligarchical commodity English</a>" for the language of art. To others it might be a hastily assembled anthology of poems protesting the war in Iraq or a display of high-voltage postmodernism by Keston Sutherland on the same subject. John Redmond considers the treatment of public and private spheres in contemporary poetry and the way in&nbsp;which these concepts inform its reception. His principal aim is to counter the lazy application of political rhetoric to literature in ways that appear to make sense of poems but don't – "the determination to read poetry in publicly oriented ways, the determination to make it fit with one kind of public program or another".</p><p>A prime instance of this occurs in Redmond's revisiting of one of the great poems of our time, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview11" title="">Derek Mahon</a>'s <a href="http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/?p=759" title="">"A Disused Shed in Co Wexford"</a>: "Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, / Among the bathtubs and the washbasins / A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole." While "A Disused Shed" has always been read in the light of Northern Ireland's Troubles, there is little consensus as to what it might be saying on that subject, once we apply critical "determination" that it should deliver a translatable allegory of its dark times. To Seamus Deane, it is about waiting for the nightmare of violence to end and history to begin. To Tom Paulin and Hugh Haughton, Mahon's mushrooms give a voice to the victims of political violence, while to Seamus Heaney the mushrooms are identified with Unionist power, speaking with the "pre-natal throats" of Mahon's Protestant ancestors.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/21/poetry-privacy-john-redmond-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureSeamus HeaneySylvia PlathFri, 21 Jun 2013 17:30:00 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/21/poetry-privacy-john-redmond-reviewPhotograph: Paul Faith/PA Archive/Press Association ImaWriting on the wall … does Derek Mahon’s poetry long to escape from the Troubles? Photograph: Paul Faith/PA Archive/Press Association ImaPhotograph: Paul Faith/PA Archive/Press Association ImaWriting on the wall … does Derek Mahon’s poetry long to escape from the Troubles? Photograph: Paul Faith/PA Archive/Press Association ImaDavid Wheatley2013-06-21T17:30:00ZFound at Sea by Andrew Greig – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/03/found-at-sea-greig-review
A book-length poetic sequence set in remotest Orkney conjures up images of lives lived in isolation<p>"And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breaker, forth on the godly sea," runs the epigraph from <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/author/ezra-pound" title="">Ezra Pound</a> to Andrew Greig's <em>Found at Sea</em>. Between <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview24" title="">Douglas Dunn</a> on St Kilda, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/kathleenjamie" title="">Kathleen Jamie</a> on North Rona and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/19/jen-hadfield-edwin-morgan-international-poetry-prize" title="">Jen Hadfield</a> gazing across to Foula, there is scarcely a remote Scottish island that does not enjoy regular poetic traffic, a trend enthusiastically continued here.</p><p>Greig's destination is the Orcadian isle of Cava, a name to add fizz to any narrative though here meaning "calf island". Cava is a "deserted repeat deserted island", which is to say it has been depopulated twice. It is arguably best-known for its association with the pirate John Gow, who, according to Daniel Defoe, carried off two servant girls from the island. Strangely, Greig doesn't mention him, concentrating instead on the story of two women who became Cava's two sole inhabitants in 1959 and stayed for three decades.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/03/found-at-sea-greig-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFri, 03 May 2013 14:36:01 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/03/found-at-sea-greig-reviewPhotograph: Ashley Cooper/CorbisUnresolved depths … waves batter the coast of Orkney. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/CorbisPhotograph: Ashley Cooper/CorbisUnresolved depths … waves batter the coast of Orkney. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/CorbisDavid Wheatley2013-05-03T14:36:01ZField Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary by Esther Woolfson – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/15/field-notes-hidden-woolfson-review
A collection of meditations on our complex relationships with the natural world, from herring gulls to red squirrels<p>Few creatures better embody the nature of urban wildlife in Esther Woolfson's "hidden city", Aberdeen, than the herring gull. Its "profound, plaintive" cries echoing along the laneways of Old Aberdeen, it strikes many as an interloping pest, yet in its&nbsp;native coastal habitat, it is in worrying decline. It has a reputation for aggression, but is monogamous and lives amicably alongside its neighbours over a lifespan of up to 30 years. Move to Aberdeen, as I did recently, and you&nbsp;will assume the herring gull is as Aberdonian as granite and haar. Yet larus argentatus only moved inland from the seafront in the last century.</p><p>Similarly, oystercatchers are not the kind of bird you expect to see on a suburban grass verge, but Aberdeen has the largest number of roof-nesting oystercatchers in Europe. The Gaelic for this attractive wader is <em>gille-brighde</em>, St Bridget's servant, and legend has them helping Christ to hide from his enemies under some seaweed on a&nbsp;visit to Scotland. The shift from quotidian sightings to the hinterlands of mythic lore is typical of <em>Field Notes</em>, which promises a suburban focus only to fly its coop repeatedly; though getting outdoors at all is new territory – <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/book/scienceandnature/9781847080806/corvus-a-life-with-birds" title="">Woolfson's last book, <em>Corvus</em></a>, was an account of her home life with a host of rescue birds, chiefly a crow called Spike.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/15/field-notes-hidden-woolfson-review">Continue reading...</a>Science and natureBooksCultureFri, 15 Mar 2013 17:42:01 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/15/field-notes-hidden-woolfson-reviewPhotograph: Markus Botzek/Zefa/CorbisA herring gull: migrating to the city. Photograph: Markus Botzek/Zefa/CorbisPhotograph: Markus Botzek/Zefa/CorbisA herring gull: migrating to the city. Photograph: Markus Botzek/Zefa/CorbisDavid Wheatley2013-03-15T17:42:01ZThe Same Life Twice by Frank Kuppner – reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/24/same-life-twice-frank-kuppner-review
David Wheatley finds the big questions are a bulwark against boredom<p>Creation and its paradoxes have long troubled the philosophical mind. Why should there be something rather than nothing, Leibniz wondered, while Beckett's Jacques Moran has a question for the almighty: "What was God doing with himself before the creation?" In <em>The Same Life Twice</em> Frank Kuppner has written, not for the first time, a comic and cosmic meditation on all the big questions. "No, there'll never be /another me! – whatever the Universe /might proceed to do next," he begins. But this being Kuppner, such trust in the universe's duty of care to our needs proves short-lived. Flatulence is a recurring theme in his work, and seldom is he happier than when launching a rip-roaring fart in the general direction of our anthropocentric self-delusion.</p><p>Yeats judged that "Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry," but out of the quarrel with itself poetry makes Frank Kuppner books. The first two parts of <em>The Same Life Twice</em> are arranged in a verso and recto standoff, and often engage each other in an unseemly slanging match across the page. Adam and Eve and Dante and Beatrice feature prominently among the dramatis personae. A commentator, too, chips in prolifically between square brackets. The fact that we appear to be in heaven does nothing to ameliorate the bad mood. Of the three parts of <a href="http://" title="">Dante</a>'s <em>Commedia</em>, the Paradiso has always been the least translated, a neglect that may owe as much to theological as to literary reasons. "Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run?" another Beckett character, Molloy, muses to himself, and if Kuppner's Adam and Eve and Dante and Beatrice have anything in common, under their endless squabbles, it is their epic sense of boredom ("just what exactly are we doing here, Beatrice?").</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/24/same-life-twice-frank-kuppner-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFri, 24 Aug 2012 21:45:03 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/24/same-life-twice-frank-kuppner-reviewPhotograph: Corbis<em>Dante Illuminating Florence with his Poem</em> by Domenico di Michelino. Photograph: CorbisPhotograph: Corbis<em>Dante Illuminating Florence with his Poem</em> by Domenico di Michelino. Photograph: CorbisDavid Wheatley2012-08-24T21:45:03ZThe Poems in Verse by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Peter Manson - reviewhttps://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/stephane-mallarme-poems-in-verse-review
A superb translation<p>"English and French are a single language," <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/author/wallace-stevens" title="">Wallace Stevens</a> wrote in his "Adagia". While French poetry was a huge influence on English-language modernism, not all shared Stevens's belief in the closeness of the two tongues. Debating the issue with <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/author/andre-gide" title="">André Gide</a>, St-John Perse deplored the concrete nature of English and its desire to "reincarnate the thing itself". In its abstract way French used words "like coins as values of monetary exchange", he felt, whereas English "was still at the swapping stage".</p><p>With his attachment to the play of consciousness over mere actuality, Mallarmé is as un-Anglo-Saxon as they come. As a result, he has tended to attract translators of an experimental bent, such as Brian Coffey and Cid Corman. More recently, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/author/patrick-mcguinness" title="">Patrick McGuinness</a> has produced a marvellous version of the elegy Mallarmé wrote for his dead son, <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n22/stephane-mallarme/notes-for-anatoles-tomb" title="">"For Anatole's Tomb"</a>, and now with Peter Manson's <em>The Poems in Verse</em> we have a contemporary Mallarmé in extenso. It makes for one of the most exciting translations of recent years.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/stephane-mallarme-poems-in-verse-review">Continue reading...</a>PoetryBooksCultureFri, 15 Jun 2012 21:55:09 GMThttp://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/stephane-mallarme-poems-in-verse-reviewPhotograph: Archivo Iconografico/CorbisPortrait of Mallarmé by Edouard Manet (1876). Photograph: Archivo Iconografico/CorbisPhotograph: Archivo Iconografico/CorbisPortrait of Mallarmé by Edouard Manet (1876). Photograph: Archivo Iconografico/CorbisDavid Wheatley2012-06-15T21:55:09Z